Household Gods

As a novelist, Neil Gaiman is as frustrating and elusive as Anansi,
the West African trickster god who gives Gaiman's latest book, Anansi
Boys, its title. And for that reason, it's tempting to draw a
comparison between Gaiman, a proficient storyteller, and Anansi, who's
credited as the source, or at least the shaper, of all stories. But it's
closer to the mark to compare Gaiman to his titular characters,
protagonist Fat Charlie Nancy and his brother, Spider -- both of whom,
in their own way, don't quite live up the magical potential inherent in
their bloodlines.

Fat Charlie is a somewhat dull, put-upon (but not fat) sort, cast in the
mold of, say, Douglas Adams' Arthur Dent (more on Adams in a bit). Upon
attending his father's funeral, Fat Charlie is told that his father was,
in fact, Anansi, and that he has a long-lost brother he doesn't
remember. Sure enough, Fat Charlie reaches out to Spider, who promptly
shows up and proves to be everything Fat Charlie isn't: handsome,
mysterious, carefree, confident, cool and, on top of all that, magical.
Spider can manipulate reality to suit his fancy, and cloud peoples'
minds.

(In fact, it's difficult not to picture him as Gaiman himself, leather
jacket and all -- except for the fact that all of the book's major
players are black. That fact isn't particularly relevant to this review
except for the fact that Gaiman never explicitly tells us this, leaving
us to figure it out on our own. It's a laudable enough attempt to
challenge our preconceptions -- why should we always automatically
assume that a character is white until told otherwise? -- but it
nonetheless feels like self-impressed sleight-of-hand. When the reader
does come to this realization -- and if one is paying close attention,
it doesn't take too long -- he or she is distracted from the story by
Gaiman's cleverness, and by their own in figuring it out.)

Naturally (in whatever form that term applies when relating a story
involving ancient gods), Spider begins to complicate Fat Charlie's life
a great deal, first by getting him in trouble with a thieving,
unscrupulous boss, and second by proceeding to steal Fat Charlie's
sweet-natured fiancée, Rosie. Soon enough, Fat Charlie is on his way
back to his childhood home in Florida, where he prevails upon a coven of
elderly neighbor ladies to help him get rid of his brother.

If the conflict between Fat Charlie and Spider sounds like the set-up
for a perfectly serviceable British sitcom (has "Oh, Brother" been
taken?), Gaiman quickly spins Anansi Boys further out than that,
involving the squabbling siblings in a plot involving Graham Coates, Fat
Charlie's scheming employer, who has Fat Charlie framed for embezzling,
and an ancient enemy of their father's, who wishes the brothers no good.
Eventually, everything comes to a head as a large cast of characters --
the brothers, Rosie, her mother, Coates, a pixie-ish police detective
named Daisy, and a ghost -- play out their parts on the Caribbean island
of Saint Andrews. And Gaiman nicely gives both brothers' stories an
identifiable arc; each changes in a meaningful way, and they learn
something both remarkable and (once one thinks about it) fairly obvious
about their relationship to one another.

As agreeable a page-turner as Anansi Boys is, one wishes that
Gaiman had chosen a more epic scope befitting his subject matter. But
Gaiman, perhaps (wisely) sensing that that way lies grand-scale
melodrama, instead adapts a genteel tone, tinged with the droll,
perpetually adolescent wit of a Douglas Adams (several joke-y passages
here sound inspired by
The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) or Dave Barry. Much more than the
quote-unquote "fantasy" milieu, this light touch is an invitation to
marginalization.

Anansi Boys may follow Gaiman's previous "adult" novel,
American Gods (in which Anansi also appeared) up the charts, but it
doesn't ask to be taken seriously. No one expects Gaiman to ever equal
the majesty, complexity and sheer inventiveness of the
zeitgeist-capturing Sandman comic series for which he's still
best-known; that series captured lightning in a bottle, and he's wise
not to attempt to recapture it. In fact, tonally, Anansi Boys is
very much in keeping with the rest of Gaiman's body of work, which has
made no attempt at storytelling on as grand a scale.

That's all well and good -- these are Gaiman's stories, and he's free to
tell them any way he pleases. But one finishes Anansi Boys
wishing that it carried a bit more heft, for all the supernatural raw
material at his disposal.